The term laissez faire was first used in relation to economics by the French Phyiocrats Quesnay and Turgot in the eighteenth century, when they used the motto "laissez faire, laissez allez" to describe the principles they advocated.
This is said to have come from the cry used in medieval tournaments to give the signal for combat; the equivalent in English is "a fair field and no favours".
The Physiocrats believed in freedom of opinion, freedom of the individual and freedom of exchange, and the last of these freedoms, they argued, could only be achieved in the absence of government intervention.
Physiocrats, however, also pointed out the need to abolish all taxes except a tax on the value of land; this is implicit in the concept of freedom of exchange. It is unfortunate that this aspect of laissez faire has been almost totally ignored by both its advocates and its attackers. The tax on the value of land was the "impôt unique" or single tax. Without it, laissez faire is one-legged and cannot work. But, as Chesterton said of Christianity, laissez faire hasn't failed - it has never been tried.
I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.
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